Capitalism doesn’t like humor. Jeanine Oleson intertwines craft, performance, video all with absurdist twists intended to highlight global capital’s alienating effects on our consciousness through materiality and labor. Her Creative Capital project, A human(e) matter, is now on display through August 6 at the Hammer Museum in LA as the exhibition Conduct Matters. More...

New York-based artist Jeanine Oleson has worked through multidisciplinary processes this fall at the Hammer as part of In Real Life, and as artist-in-residence for the 2016/2017 year, will debut new work in May with a Hammer Projects exhibition. More...

A human(e) matter is an umbrella concept comprised of performances, objects and videos concerned with global capital’s alienating effects on our consciousness through materiality and labor. With humor, pathos and an interest in craft and industrial production, this project forms parafictions that are absurd and dead serious. Jeanine Oleson is working with an ensemble in live performances and videos that enact compositions based on the idea of conduction that is material, musical, and social and referencing experimental music, physical labor and speech acts. A recent 3D video and related objects also focused on material transformation of copper and clay, troubling how images and sound are made and transmitted. An upcoming iteration includes a new video, performance, musical instruments, glass, weavings and images about absurdist production cycles and abstracted materiality. The video, shot in caves and mines in New Mexico, will follow a production cycle of copper into a wire factory and into a power grid.

Described in the press release as a look at "numerous experiences of the American South," the exhibition is refreshingly not a "who's who" survey of contemporary Southern artists, but instead a cross-section of some of the most exciting young artists working today, along with voices from the past, all affectionately approached through a regional lens. More...

A human(e) orchestra is an umbrella over a series of performances, workshops and a film with an ensemble brought together to enact various compositions that range from conventional music to physical labor to speech acts. Read more: creative-capital.org/projects/view/833

"As part of her New Museum residency “Hear, Here”, Jeanine Oleson has invited a room full of opera lovers to participate in performances of opera hits like they would at a Rocky Horror Picture Show screening, by dressing up, singing along, and throwing flowers." More...

"Oleson is the interdisciplinary artist behind the New Museum exhibition "Hear, Here," which explored what it really means to listen in the contemporary world. Part of this exhibition included the experimental opera "The Rocky Horror Opera Show."" More...

"I've been thinking about the importance of the audience, and more specifically about what constitutes an engaged audience member. Fran Lebowitz once made a comment about the loss of artists, cultural producers, and audiences during the AIDS crisis" More...

"Interdisciplinary artist Jeanine Oleson continues to challenge socio-political norms with her performance and installation works. This time, she dives into the farcical with a witty operatic exhibition “Hear, Here” during her five-month residency at the New Museum "More...

"For her first institutional solo exhibition, artist Jeanine Oleson, who is currently in residence as part of the New Museum's R&D Season, inhabits the roles of artist, curator, moderator, and performer, among numerous others that are equally ambitious" More...

"What do burning sage, cross-dressing and pulling an island southward with ropes have in common? They are all examples of what artist/curator Emily Roysdon has termed "Ecstatic Resistance" in her title for this exhibition, which brought together..." More...

"...in a video made earlier this year, Jeanine Oleson, assisted by a troupe of zany helpers, is seen burning an enormous sage stick on the steps of the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan to fumigate Wall Street of bad vibrations." More...

No Commercial Value

July 2009

"The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse is a traveling public art project by Jeanine Oleson. The world's largest sage smudge stick ritualistically cleansed negativity from New York City at four different sites in October and November 2008."More...

"Enkidu's Return is a 9-by-5.5-foot costume Jeanine Oleson made from recycled furs the artist bought on eBay. A reference to the "wild man" character in the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, it's offered as a "way to re-cover oneself with a primordial skin""More...

Art Papers

January/February 2007

The Journal of LLGAF

Summer 2007

"Jeanine Oleson Just Might Believe in Bigfoot and Mythos of the Lesbian Peoples..." More...

"Legend has it that there is a video store in Portland, Oregon with a whole shelf dedicated to Bigfoot porn. Now what this porn might entail is a matter much of speculation: Do these videos depict Bigfoot doing it with men or women? Or is it Bigfoot-on-Bigfoot? Bigfoot orgies?..." More...

"In his book The Damned, the great researcher of anomalous phenomena Charles Fort writes of the curious and sometimes acrobatic ends to which early modern science was prepared to go in order to explain the existence of meteorites." More...

"For a less intense and way less manipulative are viewing, however, let me recommend a visit to "Something Is Somewhere," at Monya Rowe, a show that makes an unambiguous feminist statement simply by being made up of 20 female artists." More...